This has been a bad year for dreams of dynasties. The Bush dynasty has been dismantled with Jeb, who was the first favored son, writing finis to the family dream of a trifecta. Hillary Clinton, who started plotting her path to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. when she was a law student at Yale, took a detour through Arkansas and if she still wants to be a president will have to settle for Wellesley, or Smith or one of the other Seven Sisters. But it won’t be anything in Arkansas.

Hillary Clinton won’t be able to say she didn’t see the bad moon rising. Donald Trump gave her a blistering introduction this week to Presidential Politics 102, which differs in a remarkable way from Politics 101, which she encountered in her first attempt in 2008 and before that as the managing partner in Bubba’s two campaigns. Whatever she learned from Bubba didn’t take. He was a master at covering his tracks and playing the rube when forced to, with a Huck Finn grin and country charm: “Aw, whatcha gonna do with a good ol’ boy like me?” He got away...

Every president is entitled to the confidence of the nation that he means well. That includes Barack Obama, even when he retreats to his other home in a universe far, far away. He just doesn't understand what's going on here on Planet Earth, where the rest of us live. Meaning well is not enough. He seems to understand now, after it was explained to him at some length, that America is indeed the exceptional nation that Abraham Lincoln said it is, but not for the reasons Mr. Obama thinks. "The United States of America is the most powerful nation on...

"Everything about the so-called deal with Iran, including the reputations of the men who negotiated it, is a lie. It’s likely to be a deadly lie for millions of people who will die on account of it. The world should mark well everyone responsible for it."

We're well into the new century, moving swiftly through the second decade of the new millennium, at ease in an era of science, modern medicine and wondrous electronics that our grandparents could not have imagined. (Even our parents don't understand most of it.) So why does 2015 smell like Munich in 1938, reeking of denial, blindness, cant and cowardice in the year that would introduce monstrous tyranny and barbarism, an assault on the very idea of civilization? Comparisons may be odious but only the weak and foolish look and do not see. A gunman invades the sanctity of a synagogue...

Transparency, the current vogue word for truth-telling, is usually a good thing, unless you’re trying to fool all the people some of the time, like spending 7,000 words to resurrect a fairy tale in Benghazi, all to give a helping hand to a lady in distress.The New York Times understands that Hillary Clinton is likely to be the only credible hope the Democrats have for 2016 and that she already needs lots of remedial help. The Times huffed and puffed to deliver an excuse for betrayal in Benghazi, meant to second Mrs. Clinton’s famous alibi for her tortured misfeasance as...

October 31, 2013 Spoiled, greedy, indifferent boomers infest Obama’s self-indulgent White House Wesley Pruden The Obama White House suffers from “the ‘60s disease.” The affliction seems to be terminal. The president’s men — and women — are mostly boomers, spoiled, greedy and self-centered, nurtured and indulged in the decade of the 1960s, when the culture first began to rot. The boomers taught each other many things, how to turn up the volume on their “music,” where to find the best pot and where to crash to smoke themselves into mellow stupefaction, how to avoid taking responsibility for their blunders, and...

Why are intellectuals, sometimes the most intelligent among us, so dumb? This is the question that confounds everyone; some intellectuals most of all. The late William F. Buckley Jr., a certified egghead, once said he would rather be governed by the first 50 names in the Boston telephone book than by the professors at Harvard. Another wit observes that an intellectual is someone who so prefers theory over experience that he would sit down on a red-hot stove, twice. You can be too smart for your own good, and have the blisters on your bottom to prove it. The intellectual...

Politics occasionally drive John Boehner to tears, but rarely to plain English. Gobbledygook is the Washington disease, and the Republicans have a bad case of it. Wonkery was not invented in Washington, but Washington is where it thrives. Corporate-speak is closely related to government gobbledygook, and those most fluent in the tongue have been carefully trained and tutored in using words not to amplify meanings, but to hide them. One way to do this is to use five words when one or two will do. Perfumed words are preferred. Initials and acronyms are best of all. The Democrats are rarely...

The Park Service appears to be closing streets on mere whim and caprice. The rangers even closed the parking lot at Mount Vernon, where the plantation home of George Washington is a favorite tourist destination. That was after they barred the new World War II Memorial on the Mall to veterans of World War II. But the government does not own Mount Vernon; it is privately owned by the Mount Vernon Ladies' Association. The ladies bought it years ago to preserve it as a national memorial. The feds closed access to the parking lots this week, even though the lots...

The man they called “the Hammer,” who used Democrats as anvils, got a little satisfaction Thursday. An appeals court in Texas reversed the money-laundering conviction of Tom DeLay and told him to go and sin no more. Time and events move quickly in the modern media, and a new crime of the century arrives with the noise of every news cycle. The final acquittal of Tom DeLay, who was once the Republican majority leader in the House, is but a footnote to the news. He was once the most feared man on Capitol Hill, merciless in pursuit, and like all...

Al Gore and his traveling medicine show is back in town with his new, improved snake oil, guaranteed to grow hair, improve digestion, promote regularity and kill roaches, rats and bedbugs. Al and his wagon rumbled into town on the eve of “a major forthcoming report” from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which is a panel of scientists affiliated with the United Nations. Their report is expected to buck up the spirits of the tycoons of the snake-oil industry. A snake-oil salesman’s lot, like a policeman’s, is not a happy one. There’s always a skeptic or two (or...

You can understand Barack Obama’s frustration now that he finally put down his putter on Martha’s Vineyard and noticed that something was going on in Cairo. John Kerry bestirred himself, too, pronouncing the chaos in Cairo “dreadful.” That’s pretty strong language for a tea-sipper. There’s glum agreement everywhere that there’s no peace for Egypt in sight. The nations of the West, including Israel, must keep looking, but we fool only ourselves if we think there’s a magic elixir to encourage the lion to lie down with the lamb and not regard it only as dinner. In the days following Sept....

Barack Obama is bored. You can see it in his demeanor and in his face, the way anticipation becomes melancholy. Most of all you can hear it in his voice when he steps up to make the speech that once sent audiences into frenzy. He’s mailing it in (with postage due). Being a messiah, a rock star, the Pied Piper of Hamelin, is of course hard work. Maybe we should cut the guy a break. You can’t be Mick Jagger or Kanye West every day. The president went to Illinois this week to make a speech about the economy and...

Everything about President Obama’s grand takeover of everyone’s aches and pains puts the pain in a new place. The only relief he can promise is that the pain is more tolerable today than it will be tomorrow. If the failing economy doesn’t kill you, Obamacare will. The only good news if that the abundant bad news over there might take your mind off your troubles over here. The jobs market here, such as it is, is likely to continue in the dumps. Come back soon. Many businesses, some large and some small, are moving toward an ever-larger part-time roster of...

The prosecutors of George Zimmerman need a refresher course in criminal law. If you’re a prosecutor and you believe you are putting an evil-doer away, first you have to convict him. This means proving he’s an evil-doer by proving who did the evil act. That’s not always easy, as we saw last week in Florida. Even an assistant professor of criminal law at the Bald Knob University of Law, Floral Arranging and Mortuary Science could have told the Zimmerman prosecutors there are no slam dunks in murder trials. Once a case goes to a jury of independent minds with nothing...

No closet was big enough to hold Anthony Kennedy, but he came out of something dank and dark somewhere to liberate the gay caballeros. It certainly wasn’t the law. Not even the law could accommodate the purple emotional theatrics he poured into the Supreme Court’s decision rendering the Defense of Marriage Act null, void, mean, cruel, worthless and probably fattening. When he wrote that Congress, in enacting the Defense of Marriage Act in 1996, acted with the deliberate intention to “disparage and injure” same-sex couples, he tried to put everyone who disagrees with him beyond the limits of human decency....

Michael Bloomberg obviously knows a lot about making money, even about the politics of Manhattan, where his money speaks in the loud and unctuous voice liberals love. But he doesn’t know diddly about life where the rest of us live it. He threw a tantrum after Barack Obama’s gun-control bill crashed and burned in Congress, stamping his polished wingtips on his Persian carpets, nursing a pout and behaving like a 3-year-old with a broken toy. This was excusable in a 3-year-old, but it’s not the behavior you expect of the nanny. When the wah-wah and the bitter tears subsided, the...

The Republicans who can’t wait to talk impeachment should sit down, shut up, and be patient. President Obama may yet deserve impeachment, but we’re not there yet. Patience, as anyone old enough to remember Watergate knows, is how this game is played. Republicans tempted to reach too far too soon should remember that when impeachable presidents, like persimmons, are picked green, they’re inedible. Once ripened, they’re delicious. Like guilty presidents finally run to ground, ripe persimmons can be eaten fresh, dried, raw, or cooked. Properly ripened persimmons have the texture of pudding, with no risk of becoming “a pudding without...

When crunch time comes, when the chips are down, when the rubber meets the road — employ the cliché of your choice — Americans can put away their selfish concerns and come together in common cause. Even Congress, our only native criminal class. Deep in the bowels of the Senate and House Office Buildings, secreted away where there will be no distractions, Republicans and Democrats, liberals and conservatives, have put aside partisan differences to work for the common weal. This particular weal has never had it so good. The issue at hand transcends taxes, immigration reform, the war on terrorism,...

We’ve finally located the terminus of the slippery slope. It’s on a side street in Philadelphia, in a modest three-story red-brick building, where a painted sign advertises dental, family planning, family practice, gynecological and physical therapy services. This is under an illustration of two happy parents, swinging a small child between them. But there are no happy children within these walls. This is an abortion clinic made infamous by a doctor on trial for his life, charged with killing seven infants who survived abortions, and a woman who died during “the procedure.” The State of Pennsylvania wants to execute Dr....

Atheists think they’re on the march, “like a mighty army,” as a favorite hymn of the church describes the followers of the Christ, and this angers and dispirits many Christians — before, during and after Holy Week. The mockery of Christianity, and not just the ridicule of individual Christians, has even won the sanction of the courts. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which will sanction everything weird and contentious, ruled in 2011 that “hostility to religion” is OK, after a 16-year-old Mormon boy sued his teacher for ridiculing him for his beliefs, saying there was no more evidence...

The new pope is a puzzle to nearly everybody, particularly to the politicians, pundits and other know-it-alls. He looks and sounds like a remnant of a previous time, thrown up in the squalid swamp of a trashy and superficial age. He’s not at all hip and “with it.” He’s not interested in “moving forward,” as in the current cliche. He projects humility and kindness and speaks of his Christian faith as if he really believes in the amazing grace of the Gospel. This makes the intellectual elites, and even some “holy men” of the various bureaucracies of modern Christendom, incredulous,...

Talking is the national sport in Washington. For the old geezers in Congress, it’s more fun than watching baseball, complaining about the weather or remembering sex. Nobody drones on like a U.S. senator and nobody loves the sound of his raspy voice like a U.S. senator. Rand Paul, the freshman from Kentucky who stars in the bad dreams of every Republican geezer in town, talked for almost 13 hours on the Senate floor this week to delay a confirmation vote on John O. Brennan as director of the CIA, and earned only the scorn of the geezers.

Joe Biden, a gun nut. Who knew? The veep never fails to entertain, even when he’s trying not to, and this time his boss is probably not amused. Joe famously pushed President Obama to endorse same-sex marriage by sniffing the orange blossoms first, but if his advice for Americans to buy a shotgun to protect the homeplace was an attempt to convert the president to a Second Amendment aficionado, he’ll no doubt fail. Joe’s endorsement of domestic mayhem in the cause of survival predictably infuriated those who are so terrified of guns that on certain playgrounds even little boys who...

Barack Obama is laying out a revolutionary agenda for his second term, and he’s calling up his heaviest artillery to enforce the transformative presidency delayed in the first. The campaign to confirm Chuck Hagel will be no campaign for the fainthearted summer soldiers who know only small-caliber combat. The emerging White House strategy is to repeat and repeat the canard that anyone who criticizes the president and his agenda is a racist, probably a Klansman and maybe even a conservative. If the canard is repeated often enough, some people will believe it, even if they’re mostly people who believe it...

Barack Obama says he's a Christian. Good for him (and for the Gospel). But rarely has a Christian paid such obeisance to another faith and ideology. The president's bow and scrape to Islam knows no end. That's not so good. The U.S. Army is soon to issue a handbook instructing soldiers to copy Mr. Obama's example of when and how to defer to an alien ideology that stands against everything Americans are taught, whether by faith, ethics, morals or another code of good conduct. The new manual, which runs to 75 pages, orders American military personnel to refrain from saying...

Craig Karpel is a recovering addict. He says so himself. His addiction is to Barack Obama, and his recovery inspires him to write a book. He offers a 12-step program, patterned after the program that has rescued thousands of town drunks. He’s a confirmed Obamaholic, but he doesn’t blame the president. He absolves Mr. Obama of blame for the addiction to the messiah from the South Side of Chicago that turned so many healthy Americans into junkies. His book has created a bit of a buzz already. “My name is Craig K.,” he says in the opening line of “The...

The Democrats have a Jewish problem, and his name is Barack Obama. Reluctantly, many Jews, loyal Democrats by birth and tradition, have concluded that he’s not The One they thought he was. With even greater reluctance, the White House has concluded that their Jewish problem is real, growing, and they better do something about it. Mitt Romney’s dramatic declaration Sunday in Jerusalem that preventing Iran from building a nuclear weapon is America’s “highest national security priority” and military force should not be excluded, and that he regards Jerusalem as the true capital of Israel, puts in stark relief the difference...

This is not what Barack Obama expected for a coming-out party. The “historic” revelation that he is now fully evolved, as from tadpole to frog, and now grooves on same-sex marriage, was meant to be marked with quiet ceremony. No music, no flowers, no kiss, no dancing, not even a cupcake. Rage and outrage over same-sex marriage would take everybody’s mind off the dreary economy, which whimpers on. Everybody was then supposed to shut up and get back to work (for those with work). Instead, the president gets his photograph (with a rainbow halo) on the cover of Newsweek magazine...

If only those pesky Jews would shut up and submit, all would be right with the world. Allah could be praised. Such is the emerging Democratic strategy for making peace in the Middle East. Only this week, Hillary Rodham Clinton, the secretary of state, and Leon E. Panetta, the secretary of defense, sent reassurances to the region that they’re eager to see Israel brought to heel. Mr. Panetta even employed a little mild profanity, undignified as that may be for a Cabinet officer, to attempt to intimidate the Israelis. Get back to “the damn table” and resume negotiations, he told...

ANALYSIS/OPINION The 2012 presidential marathon is on, and one mainstream pollster (Rasmussen) says a Republican apparition is opening up a lead on President Obama. (Any Republican 46 percent, Barack Obama 42 percent.) A growing number of Democrats figure that whoever can keep his head in the rattle and bang of unexpected events just doesn’t understand the situation. Republicans tempted to indulge in excessive giddiness should remember this is akin to fantasy football. A poll is a snapshot, and snapshots can deceive. Tomorrow is another day, to quote the estimable Mrs. Scarlett O’Hara Butler, and the chickens of ‘12 are not...

Sarah Palin is the hottest act in town, and the critics can only grind their teeth.... Her “secret” bus tour of America is a secret so closely held that she travels in a Greyhound-sized monster decorated with her name and an American flag the size of a barn. The lady who was mocked by the wisenheimers for saying she could see Russia from her backyard in Alaska now sees revenge through the windshield of her bus. The media’s Gaffe Patrol, ever on the scout for mistakes, errors, blunders, slips of the tongue and other erratum the patrollers think they see...

<p>The president, revealing himself to be Barack Obungle, has done what nobody else could have done, not even the spectacularly hapless original New York Mets, who drove Casey Stengel to his famous cry of terminal frustration.</p>
<p>The White House converted a picture-perfect military operation into a public-relations disaster that will be cited as what not to do and how not to do it in flackery textbooks for a hundred years. Days after the raid on Osama bin Laden’s “mansion” they still can’t get the “fact pattern,” in the language of the White House, even close to straight.</p>

ANALYSIS/OPINION: "The difference between the Soviet Union and the United States," an elderly Russian woman said to me over a cup of rough black tea on my first visit to Moscow a quarter of a century ago, "is envy. If a Russian sees a new car parked at his neighbor's house, he says, 'I'm going to find out how he got it and turn him in.' "But if an American sees a new car parked in front of his neighbor's house, he says, 'My, that is such a beautiful car. I'm going ask my neighbor how to get one of...

Barack Obama, like all flimflam men, is a master of words. But unlike the best of the flimflam men, he can't keep his stories straight. Here he was on Friday night last, speaking about the ground zero mosque to a dinner at the White House celebrating Ramadan: "Let me be clear: As a citizen and as president I believe that Muslims have the same right … to build a place of worship and a community center on private property in Lower Manhattan. … This is America, and our commitment to religious freedom must be unshakable." Who argues with that? But...

This is the week of decision, the ultimate showdown over Barack Obama's government takeover of health care and a big piece of the American economy. It's only the latest of a series of ultimate showdowns, but eventually one of them will live up to the hype. This could be the one? Nancy Pelosi, the dominatrix of the Democrats, boasts that she has the votes to prevail, but if she does, it's a puzzle why she and the president keep putting off the vote. If she has the votes, why did the president postpone leaving for Guam, Indonesia and Australia to...

You can fool some of the people some of the time, as Abraham Lincoln observed, and you even can fool all the people some of the time. But you can't fool all the people all the time. Al Gore and his friends got so excited about points one and especially point two that they forgot point three. Not everybody is on to the global-warming scam, not yet, but all the people — or enough of them — are getting there. "Global warming," or even "climate change" as Al's marketing men now insist that it be called, is becoming the stuff...

Barack Obama dropped by the White House press room the other day to stick it to the Republicans in the name of comity and fellowship. He offered to cooperate with the Republicans in the Mafia spirit of making an "offer you can't refuse." "I'm willing to move off some of the preferences of my party in order to meet them halfway," he told the reporters, "but there's got to be some give from their side as well. I also won't hesitate to condemn what I consider obstinacy." The only way Republicans can demonstrate their lack of obstinacy, the president made...

gentlemen of the press (and the ladies, too) are mostly a decent sort, often a bit prideful and sometimes with not very much to be prideful about. They're comfortable only by running in a herd. Trying to think alone gives them a migraine. A fortnight ago, Scott Brown was merely a footnote to the ritual of selecting a successor to Teddy Kennedy, not worth the attention of respectable reporters, pundits or pollsters. Everyone in the herd was sure that "the Kennedy mystique," though tattered and frayed, would produce a suitable substitute to fill Teddy's size twelves. A pundit or pollster...

Rarely has a cowboy castrated himself in public like Ben Nelson, the senator from Nebraska, who becomes an object lesson in how a United States senator easily trades his "convictions" and "principles" for perfectly legal bribes from cynical party leaders. When the inevitable howling erupted in Nebraska, all the senator could come up with was a variation on the oldest excuse in Washington: "I didn't do it, and maybe I won't do it again."

President Obama finally makes it back to familiar and frozen Copenhagen, scene of his earlier success in winning the Olympics for Chicago, trying to figure out a way to make zero plus zero amount to something big. His prospects aren't good. He leaves behind a chaotic debate over his health care "reform," a debate awash in irony, confusion and incredulity. The next stop is farce. ObamaCare, which the president promised would be a simple, thrifty, economical cure-all for the health care system, runs to 2,074 pages that a roomful of Philadelphia lawyers (or worse, Washington lawyers) couldn't parse. But...

Now that every nut in America is equipped with a laptop computer, you're likely to run afoul of a nut on the loose almost anywhere. I observed in this space earlier this week that Barack Obama's curious need to travel the world to make endless apologies for America might stem from his spending the most formative years of his childhood growing up in the Third World. I mentioned two observable facts, neither in any way accusatory or rude, that his father was a Kenyan (Marxist) and the mother who raised him was obviously attracted to men of the Third World,...

A little traveling, like a little learning, can be a dangerous thing. Barack Obama on the loose in a foreign land is enough to frighten protocol officers and embarrass the rest of us. He went off to Asia to tell the Chinese a thing or two about world trade, to prepare the world for a treaty to make the sun change its spots, and of course to pay his respects to assorted heads of state, with particular attention to any royal head (perhaps even including Miss Universe) who crosses his path. So far it's a memorable trip. He established a...

From Article Some of the president's critics are giving him a hard time, and it's true that this president seems never to have studied much American history. Not bowing to foreign potentates was what 1776 was all about. His predecessors learned with no difficulty that the essence of America is that all men stand equal and are entitled to look even a king, maybe particularly a king, straight in the eye. Can anyone imagine George Washington, John Adams or Thomas Jefferson making a similar gesture of servile submission? Or Harry Truman? Or FDR, who famously served the lowly hot dog,...

This is one Mr. Deeds who apparently isn't going to town. The collapse of the Democratic campaign for governor of Virginia speaks volumes about what the body politic is trying to tell Obama's Democrats. They're learning, painfully, that campaigning without George Bush is baffling, frustrating and scary. Worse, it offers a preview of what the congressional campaigning will be like next year. For weeks, The Washington Post, house organ of the national Democratic Party, pounded away at McDonnell, the Republican nominee, for having written politically incorrect term papers in graduate school, as proof that he doesn't like women very much....

Throwing rotten eggs at "them lyin' newspapers" has always been great sport in America, and sometimes even effective politics. But it has to be done with wit and humor, which may be above Barack Obama's pay grade. Thomas Jefferson despised newspapers, with considerable justification. They printed libels and slanders about him that persist to the present day. Yet he famously said that if he had to choose between government without newspapers and newspapers without government, he would cheerfully choose to live in a land with newspapers (even not very good ones) and no government. Harry Truman threatened to demolish the...

The cruel world is closing in on Barack Obama. Springfield was never like this. The president can only look back with yearning for the days when he was the star of the state legislature, where a legislator's only concern is who's going to pick up the tab for drinks and supper. His dithering time in the big new world is limited by events, which occur to a timetable that mere man, even a minor-league messiah, cannot control. The White House insists that the president is hard at work on what to do about Afghanistan, and whether to send more troops...